


Wait For It

by divini_t



Series: Illustrious Sons [1]
Category: Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars: Before the Awakening - Greg Rucka
Genre: Gen, Not Beta Read, Not Romance, mentions of canon character deaths, other characters untagged as they're in the background and not pertinent to the story, probably not canon compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-30
Updated: 2016-01-30
Packaged: 2018-05-17 04:43:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5854666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/divini_t/pseuds/divini_t
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The massacre on Jakku is not the first time that Poe meets Kylo Ren. No, he remembers him by another name, from a time when things were simpler. He'll do anything to get back there, no matter how long he has to wait for it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wait For It

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cherryarcade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherryarcade/gifts).



> The lyric "I am Inimitable, I am an original" struck me as equal parts Poe and Kylo, and this sort of spawned from there. Go easy on me, it's been a while since I've written anything to post. This is not meant to be read as romantic. This is also un-beta'd.

Poe's strides are long, and he can hear the quick fall of footsteps behind him.

He's six, and he's visiting General Organa with his parents, and needless to say, he's bonded with Ben Solo quite fast. The toddler runs after him, calling for him to wait, and as he turns, Ben collides with him, falling onto his behind. Leia looks up in worry, but Poe crouches down to the younger boy's level.

“You don't have to run,” Poe says gently, reaching out to wipe away the big crocodile tears now rolling down his small friend's cheeks. “It's okay, Ben, don't cry.”

“You'll leave without me if I don't run,” Ben replies softly, shyly, sniffling and pawing at his face with his tiny, chubby hands.

Poe smiles a smile with two teeth missing, lost in a wrestling match with Ben earlier that morning. They were loose anyway, and it's kind of cool to have lost them to someone who had latched onto him so fast.

“Ben, I will never leave without you,” he assures the little one in as firm a voice he could manage.

“Do you promise?” Ben whimpered.

“I promise, Ben.”

They're thick as thieves and absolutely inseparable. When it's time for him to return to Yavin 4 with his parents, he makes sure that his parents have access to a comm channel so that he can send messages to Ben to keep his promise.

 

Shara falls and doesn't get up again. Poe was with her, watched her press her hand to her forehead, sway, and fall.

She was gone before he got to her side.

He's eight years old and he doesn't yet understand what death means. He also knows that his midichlorian count isn't high enough for him to be Force-sensitive, but he swears to himself that when his mother is pronounced dead, he feels the Force cleave him in half, straight through his very being. His mother taught him everything he knows, and while he loves his father, it's not quite the same as it is with his mother, because she's his mother.

It rains the day of her funeral. Han is there, and Leia, along with a whole throng of Rebellion members who became Resistance members, all honoring his mother's life, achievements, and memory.

_Memory_. He's still so young, but the thought makes him sick.

He runs.

Climbing a tree that he used to climb with his mother, he sits in the cradle of branches, hidden carefully by leaves and refusing to acknowledge the rain as it stung at his eyes and drenched his clothing to the bone. He hears a voice on the wind and pretends that it isn't real because maybe, just this once, if he doesn't answer Ben, the younger boy will go away and leave him alone.

But Ben is Force-sensitive, and Poe can't hide from the Force. It's not long before the six year old is blinking rain from his dark eyes, peering up the trunk of the tree through the branches, his keen eyes searching for Poe. Poe can see him from where he is, but he knows that Ben can probably only see part of his boots.

“Are you gonna come down?” Ben calls up.

“Go _away_ , Ben,” Poe calls back, his voice exasperated.

“You're not supposed to climb trees during storms,” the younger replies back snarkily. “You could get electrocuted.”

“Sounds wizard right now.” If a shrug had a tone, Poe's voice was most certainly a verbal shrug.

It's quiet for a while, just the rain and the wind accompanying the Dameron boy's heavy breathing.

“Please just come down, Poe,” Ben says a little quieter than he had been speaking before. “My mom will kill me if I climb up to you, and I can't hug you in a tree.”

He just sounds so defeated, and much the way he couldn't handle when Ben cried, Poe couldn't handle his defeated tone. Climbing down is as hard as climbing up was, and the moment gravity pulls him down to the ground, his knees give out under him, Poe sinking to the ground.

It starts to settle in uncomfortably fast, the feeling of loss and being lost. Ben wraps his arms around him before he realizes that the horrible, anguished sounds that he hears are coming from his lips. There's so much pain and he can't let go of it, he doesn't think that he'll ever be able to let go of it.

He tastes darkness for the first time, and he thinks that he might understand just why it's so tempting, like people stay it is.

 

He's ten, and Ben is eight.

It's two years since Shara died, and Poe's still so sick over it. Nothing is the same without her, like the light has gone out of his life. They're talking, as they often do, about what they want to do and who they want to be.

“I'm going to do what I think is right,” Poe says.

Ben scoffs lightly, something that he's picked up since the last time they saw each other. Poe silently thinks that it makes him look a little bit like his father, and chooses not to say it. He knows that things are weird with Ben's parents, much the way he knew when things were weird with _his_ parents.

“What's that even _mean_?”

Poe makes an unsure noise and shrugs. “When I know, I'll know. I have to follow my gut. I just want to do something that I think would make my mother proud.”

Ben is quiet for a long moment, as if sensing the sheer anger that rises in him when he mentions his mother. Poe wouldn't be shocked if the young boy could honestly read all of the things he felt, because he knew that Leia could. It's another long handful of minutes before he speaks again, in that timid voice that makes Poe want to immediately jump to his defense.

“Do you think I could do that?” he asks. “Do something to make someone proud?”

He seems really bothered waiting for Poe to answer, and so he nods.

“Of course,” Poe smiled. “You could become whatever you wanted and you'd make people proud, as long as you were happy. Aren't you going to train with General Skywalker soon?”

“Mother wants me to, but I still don't know,” his best friend replies.

“I wish I was Force-sensitive like you are. It feels like it's there sometimes, but but just doesn't seem like enough,” the older boy sighs almost wistfully. “When you get back, and you're a Jedi and I'm an ace pilot, we'll have to show each other what we can do. I'll even teach you how to fly my mom's A-wing. Deal?”

It brings a smile to the eight year-old's face.

“Deal.”

 

It's a year later when he's actually kind of scared of how he feels. 'Anyone can fall to the Dark, Poe,' his mother always told him. 'You don't have to use the Force or be a Jedi to know the balance needed between both sides of you.'

He's tired of feeling like he's poisoning himself, like the darkness is an ink stain spreading until it taints everything Light in him.

Anyone can fall to the Dark, but he's not _anyone_. He's Poe Dameron, and he can do anything. So, he runs back to the Light full-tilt.

It isn't a metaphor. He runs back to the tree he climbed with his mother only a handful of years before, where he climbed down and fell into Ben's arms and tasted that burnt bitterness at the back of his throat for the first time. Poe inhales, shaking and unstable. It's so strange to him that a place can hold memories of happiness and sorrow, and people can pass it like it's just nothing.

His exhale brings him to his knees, hot and angry tears stinging his eyes as his hands curl in his dark hair and he screams his rage out to the galaxy. His chest feels like it's in a vice and he can't breathe, gasping out those wretched, animal sounds until he's hoarse and nothing comes but rasping and phlegm.

With swollen eyes, he looks up, watching the sky. The clouds look like they're about to break open and his chest hasn't stopped hurting, but he feels... lighter. Free of his pain.

Picking himself up, he drags himself back to the ranch, exhausted down to every cell and midichlorian in his body. He crawls into his father's lap and is asleep before the galaxy unfolds above them like a blanket of starlight across the night sky.

 

Ben is ten, and Poe is twelve, but feels far too old to be how young he is.

It isn't even a maturity thing, really. He knows this time was going to come, but it doesn't feel any better happening now. It's four years to the day his mother died, and he feels like he's losing someone else the way he lost her.

Poe's trying to be positive, but he knows that he's miserable, and he knows that _Ben_ knows he's miserable. It's a shared misery, because it's hard enough for them to be friends the way they are when they're systems apart, but now that he's about to become a Padawan-

“I don't want to go,” Ben says softly, his voice muffled by Poe's stomach.

They're curled up on the floor of his room in Leia's quarters. Poe can hear Kes and Leia talking in the next room over, and part of him feels as though they're going to be pulled away from each other, as often happens when they're like this, but they were always like this, limbs too big for their respective bodies in a tangle wherever they decided to throw themselves down before it was time for one of them to go so many systems away from the other.

“You have to,” Poe says softly, and he hates that he's just parroting what Leia's saying. He's not yet a teenager, but he wants to yell that sending a boy away from his family, from his _mother_ , is only going to mess him up more.

“Poe, I'm scared,” he whispers, so quietly that the Dameron boy nearly misses what he says. “There's this voice in my head, and I just... I don't feel safe without my mom, or without you, and if I go with Luke-”

He sits up and looks at Poe. There are tears brimming in his dark eyes, and since they were children, meeting for the first time only a short six years before, Poe Dameron has hated to see Ben Solo in tears.

“What if what the voice says is true? That I'll never amount to anything, that I'll disappoint my family? That you'll all see my weakness and leave me behind?”

Poe scowls softly, brushing away the tears that have already rolled down his friend's freckled face. “I'll never leave you behind, Ben Solo. And even if you never amounted to anything, I'd still love you.”

It gets a weak smile, but Poe's pretty sure that he's not convinced.

“I made you something,” he tells his friend, scooting away from him to reach into his bag. What he pulls out is a leather bracelet that his father helped him make. It's the eighth attempt, mostly because Poe didn't think that it fit right for Ben until the eighth try. Taking the other boy's wrist, he tied it carefully to make sure that it wouldn't come off. “So that you don't forget me when you're off training to be the galaxy's best Jedi.”

Another gentle smile, followed by Ben rolling his eyes and scoffing like he usually did when Poe said something that he thought was ridiculous. His long fingers trailed over the bracelet and he sighed, looking up at Poe with dark eyes that were still a little watery.

“I don't have anything to give you so that you don't forget me,” he says with something that sounds like pain.

“You're my best friend,” Poe laughs. “I could never forget you.”

But he definitely hugs Ben harder before he boards the ship with Luke, clinging like it's the last time that he's every going to see Ben Solo. And if his heart breaks a little as he watches the ship leave atmo, he smothers it and keeps the memory of his friend's last smile in his mind.

 

Poe Dameron is seventeen and preparing to join the Republic Navy when his father tells him that he has a visitor. People never come to see them on Yavin 4 anymore, so he's not sure who to expect.

Leia Organa is the last person that he thinks he's going to see. Her hands are clasped in front of her and her eyes are rimmed with red like she's been crying nonstop. He sees that she's holding the bracelet, _Ben's_ bracelet, and feels something like a rip through the Force, or what he perceives it as.

“No. Please, Maker, No.”

That's his voice. That's _his_ voice, cracking and breaking as the tears come unbidden and he tries to block out what General Organa is saying.

“Something happened at Luke's temple,” she breathes, trying to maintain her calm and he knows that it must be hard for her, breaking this news to a boy who may as well have been her second son. “Ben is- Ben fell to the Dark Side. He's gone, Poe.”

The words break him in half, and if his heart broke the day that Ben was sent away, then today, it's shattered.

There are no funeral proceedings, but Poe mourns and silently swears to himself that whatever he has to do to bring Ben home will be done. One day.

 

It's his second flight for Leia, the second mission she's sent him on after telling him that he didn't have to take it, that he could drop out and not go and she would forgive him. But Leia Organa, his general, is the only mother he has left, and she's shouldered so much and tried so hard to make the galaxy right that he can't let her down.

Finding Lor San Tekka isn't really that hard at all, so he's not shocked when Beebee-Ate comes hurrying into the dwelling, alerting him in hurried binary of incoming ships. He just wishes that they'd had more time, because then maybe he wouldn't have endangered this place sso full of peace. When he sees the First Order shuttles, he warns the older man, but he intends to stand his ground. There are always men like the First Order, Poe understands, and he knows that if they don't stand up to fight, they'll be gunned down anyway.

His X-wing is hit before he can take off, but he has a mission to complete, giving the map to his droid and hoping for the best. _I'll come back for you,_ he promises ardently, and then, he stays behind, taking out a Stormtrooper with a single blaster shot.

Another ship lands, and Poe finds himself in chills at the imposing figure that walks from it, tall and dressed in black from head to toe. It's been almost twenty years, but he _knows_.

_When I'm a pilot and you're trained, you'll have to show me everything that you learned, okay?_

_**Deal.** _

He fires when Ben -because he will never be anything but Ben to Poe- strikes down the elder, and the paralysis hits him instantly, his blaster bolt humming in the air as the Stormtroopers drag him past it. The sand is hard as he's shoved to his knees, and then his friend, hiding behind a mask, is in his face.

“Who talks first?” Poe asks to break the ice. “Do you talk first, do I talk first?”

His bravado in the face of a creature in a mask is a weak attempt to diffuse his fear, the way it's always been since he was a child, pretending to be a fearless fighter in the rebellion. “It's just kind of hard to understand you with all the apparatus-”

“Search him,” Ren orders.

He's patted down and scanned, his gaze never breaking. It's been twenty years; what does Ben look like under there?

“Nothing, sir.”

“Take him aboard.”

The order sends chills down his spine, and as he's dragged away, he hears another.

_Kill them all._

 

The beating doesn't do anything to loosen his tongue. He's resilient, because he knows that Luke Skywalker is their last hope. The Stormtroopers are precise with their strikes, enough to hurt him but nothing that caused permanent damage. He isn't sure how long it went on, but he knows that he had to last as long as he could. Poe couldn't give them what they wanted, and he certainly isn't going to.

Which was why he knew that Ben would come for him eventually.

_No,_ he reminds himself. _This isn't Ben._

Ben had been a gentle boy who didn't take teasing well. He had been a boy who captured spiders instead of killing them, a boy who loved his mother dearly.

He was not the boy who ordered the massacre of a village full of innocents.

“I had no idea we had the best pilot in the Resistance on board,” the imposing figure states through the voice modulator in his mask. “Comfortable?”

Poe scowls, almost imagining the smirk on Ben's face at the words. “Not really,” he replies nonchalantly, even though his body aches like a ripening bruise.

“We both wanted the same thing from the old man. Perhaps he was more forthcoming with you than he was with me.”

Poe scoffs. “Hard to get cooperation from a dead man.”

“A truism that you should reflect upon. Where did you put it?” Ren asks him.

“Where did I put what?” he replies innocently.

“This will go more quickly and less awkwardly if we dispense with the childish nonsense.” He looms over Poe, his tone dark.

“The Resistance will not be intimidated by you.” Poe all but snarls as he's yanked forward by an unseen force, a pressure on his chest and his head.

“There is no 'Resistance in this room', only the pilot Poe Dameron and I.”

It feels like agony, the leather-encased hand extends toward him.

“Tell me where it is.”

Poe doesn't say a word, groaning at the strain it takes to fight him physically searching through his memories. He sees everything in flashes, reliving every pain of watching Ben hurt or upset, watching him leave with his parents. He sees his mother die again and again and again for what seems like an eternity before he sees Ben leaving again, then Leia giving him the news of what had happened to Luke's students and getting the bracelet he wore around his wrist back, the pain he felt knowing that Ben was essentially dead and gone. But _Leia_.

She's the trigger that Ben needs to unravel his thoughts, skim through the memories of his briefing, finding Tuanal, putting the map into BB-8 and sending him fleeing to safety.

Poe gasps as the agony ceases, black spots dancing in his vision. He feels weak and pathetic, and he knows that nobody will be coming for him.

As Kylo Ren leaves the room, Poe resolves that he will try his hardest to find the light in his friend once more, and if he has that long to wait and has to do so, he'll wait for it.

 

Nobody is coming for him, and so when a Stormtrooper enters the room and says that he's taking the prisoner to Ren, Poe feels fear under the throbbing pain his body and mind are wracked with.

The last thing he's expecting is this Stormtrooper to be rescuing him.

“Are you with the Resistance?” he asks, even though he's pretty sure of the answer.

“Are you _crazy_?” the dark skinned man asks him. “Do you really think that a Resistance sympathizer would be _here_?”

“Why are you helping me?” he asks.

“Because it's the right thing to do,” the trooper asserts.

“If we're doing this, you've gotta be honest with me. You need a pilot?”

The younger man nods firmly. “I need a pilot.”

And maybe he's crazy, but he thinks that they can do this. He _knows_ that they can do this. But he has to go back for BB-8. He made a promise, and he's never been one to break one of his promises, for all the trouble that it finds him in sometimes.

He doesn't quite expect to befriend the Stormtrooper who saved him, but he hears the longing for belonging in his voice when he gives Poe his name- no, his _designation._

FN-2187.

“If that's what they call you, then I'm not using it. FN, huh? How about Finn? Do you mind if I call you Finn?”

“Finn?” the gunner muses, testing it for a moment. “Finn. I like that!”

“I'm Poe, Poe Dameron,” Poe yells back. He unashamedly uses Ben's taunt about him being the best pilot in the Resistance as a chance to show off his abilities. He made a promise to show his friend what he could do once they were older, wiser, and more skilled than they had been at eight and ten. They take out as many weapons systems as they can, Finn and Poe, Poe and Finn, and it's when they're entering Jakku's atmosphere once more that they're hit.

 

When he wakes up, he doesn't remember anything, much less his own name. He smells smoke that burns his lungs. It comes back in flashes, the escape, the hit, barely setting the TIE fighter down in the desert.

_Finn._

Poe tries to yell for his copilot in the escape and chokes, scrambling to get out of the cockpit before something explodes and takes him with it. His jacket, sticky with his own blood, catches and he doesn't stop moving, wriggling out of it and moving toward where he hopes civilization is. He yells for his rescuer, for the Stormtrooper who accepted the name that he'd asked to call him, and when the anxious calls of the pilot go unanswered, the guilt sinks like a stone.

He's responsible for the one person who came for him dying.

His name comes next through the haze of the concussion. Poe. Poe Dameron, the son of Shara Bey and Kes Dameron, a Commander in the Resistance, and their best pilot.

His mission is after that. Recover the map that leads to Luke Skywalker from a man on Jakku. That's where he is, and the map...

The map was put into BB-8, and he'd been going back for the droid when the First Order blew them out of space.

Steeling himself through the fog and the pain in his bones and his brain, Poe keeps moving, he has a mission to complete.

His next rescue is unmiraculous, the pilot using his way with words to convince a Blarina to get him to someone with a ship. From there, he can easily get back to the Ileenium system, or get into contact with the General somehow. He hopes that BB-8 is in good hands, and not Ben's.

He thinks a lot on the flight back to D'Qar, about his friend, or rahter, the man who used to be his friend. The bracelet around his wrist, made longer by the constant adding of leather strips as he grew older, almost burns his skin. Ben couldn't be gone, no matter how much the darkness he had always struggled with pushing away told him. Ben was still in there somewhere, he knew it.

There was a reason things had gone the way that they had. He'll learn eventually and until then, he'll wait.

 

Poe doesn't get much chance for recovery before they're called in as cavalry to Takodana, to Maz Kanata's castle where Han Solo and the Milennium Falcon supposedly have BB-8. The dogfight is... fun. It feels like suitable revenge for the torture that the Stormtroopers put him through, and though spite and vengeance are no reason to do things, this feels like a great time to do it, just the once.

It isn't until later, when they're back on D'Qar and he's talking with the tech that he learns who was with Han Solo.

BB-8 rushes him, and he's ecstatic to be reunited with the droid, who chirps excitedly about all the things that they did and saw with Rey and Finn.

_Finn_ , who rushes him, meeting him halfway in a fierce hug. It occurs to Poe that Finn's probably never hugged another human being in his life, and Poe hugs him tighter.

He gives Finn his jacket, clapping him on the shoulder and assuring him that he's a good man, and then they're off again.

 

Starkiller Base was a planet once, Poe learns. This was before the First Order hacked it, drilling into the surface and turning it into a gargantuan weapon capable of doing worse than the Death Star. He can tell from the pain on Leia's face that she felt it, the disturbance in the Force when the Hosnian system was destroyed. He knows that their system is going to be next before it's even confirmed.

And he knows that he's terrified out of his mind when he meets the other pilots in the hangar. They're scared, all of them, but they do it anyway, because it's their job.

Jessika pulls him into a tight hug before they run to their individual ships, Jess going to Blue Three while Poe headed to Black One. They didn't have to exchange words to know that they were saying goodbye if they didn't get the chance to see each other after their mission was complete.

He goes into the battle with the thought that he doesn't want to lose another friend to the First Order, that he wants to get Rey back for Finn, and he also kind of wants to punch Ben Solo in the face, but he'll get to that last one eventually.

They can't make a dent in the oscillator until their ground support blows a hole in the structure from the inside, and they lose pilots in the process, but they're flyboys and flygirls and this is what they do. As long as there's light, they've got a chance, he tells the others.

 

When the base implodes and becomes a new sun, all he can wonder is if there are going to be repercussions due to the moving of the system's light source one AU, but nobody says anything, or nobody cares. They jump to hyperspace, and before much longer, they're back at D'Qar. He celebrates with the others, a rousing hug the way that he meets Rey, the girl that they went there to rescue, and they bond while waiting for information about Finn's well-being. They have him in a medically induced coma so that he can heal and the bacta can do its work, but that doesn't worry Poe any less, and it certainly doesn't worry _Rey_ any less either. She latches onto him as quickly as Finn did and dare he say it, as quickly as Ben did once. He finds that he loved her as quickly as he loved them, though maybe not the same way he loved - _loved?_ \- Ben.

“Come find me when you get back,” he tells her. “Show me all the stuff that General Skywalker teaches you.”

She beams, and nods. “Only if you teach me how to fly Black One.”

Poe groans, faking wounded with his hand over his heart, and she laughs. It oddly mirrors the way he and Ben spoke before he left and he knows that the weariness shows on his face when Rey grabs him and kisses his forehead.

“I'll see you again. I promise. May the Force be with you, Poe.”

He smiles. “And with you, Rey.”

She does the same to Finn before she goes, and he expects the heartbreak of watching another friend leave him to come again, but it doesn't.

 

He's thirty-three, and it's been about three months that Rey and Luke have been gone on their most recent mission. It's been a year since she went to start her training and returned with Luke at her side, and they've seen their fair share of battles in that time, but the moment her feet are on the ground and she's off the Milennium Falcon, Poe scoops her up and spins her around, laughing at how much she's changed and stayed the same in their time apart. She makes a comment about the silver streaks in his hair, and he brushes them off. Same song and dance, different place in time.

It's been a while.

She's a Knight now, and between her and Luke, the new generation of Jedi will have a strong base to learn from. Poe's still a Commander, and Finn is a Commander leading infantry on the ground. The war hasn't been good to them, but as long as there's Light, they have a chance.

Chewbacca exits the Milennium Falcon, and the last to leave is a tall, dark haired man with a scar across his face. Poe feels sick to his stomach, a combination between anxiety and relief at the sight of him without the mask.

Leia meets him first, and he crumples to his knees, blabbering unintelligibly into her stomach as sobs shake his body. Poe can practically feel the forgiveness radiating off of the empath, and he knows that there will be much discussion about what's to be done with him, but she's just glad that he's home.

When he sees Poe, he physically flinches. The pilot still feels a strong desire to punch him in the face, but instead, he takes off the bracelet that he's worn for the last twenty years, tying it around the wrist it should never have left.

“I don't forgive you,” he tells Ben outright.

“I don't expect you to,” Ben replies, as uncomfortable in his body as he was the day that he left to train with Luke.

“That doesn't mean that we can't start over.”

It shakes Ben to the core, he knows it, he can see it in those watery, conflicted eyes. “You waited.”

Poe grins lightly. "I told you, I wasn't going to leave without you."

**Author's Note:**

> Eight and ten year-old Ben and Poe's conversation inspired partly by: [casualties by tumblr user lledra-fanstuffs](http://lledra-fanstuffs.tumblr.com/post/136924586223/casualties)  
> Dialogue from the interrogation scene and the escape scene are mostly a mesh of film and novel dialogue.


End file.
